RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Is it just me, or are these denominations simply negligible and irrelevant?
Even early on, the amount of treasure/wealth/money to give to a level 2 character, as an example, is in the hundreds of gold.
Why even bother with anything lower than gold coins?
I wish they had made copper and silver more used in the early stages of the game. But right now, even the simplist magic items cost hundreds of gold. As it stands, there is no reason or incentive to track how much copper and silver you have. If a piece of bread costs 1 silver in a tavern, is it really worth the trouble to track that your character spent 1 silver? That's only 1/10th of a gp!
This is related to the fact that PC gear is part of your power progression. Though I wasn't present for the decision-making process, they apparently decided that part of the advancement of PCs' power would be based on magic items. As with any source of PC power, it needs to be limited in some way so as to have the power come in at the right point in the game. The way they chose to do that for gear was by price; things get exponentially more expensive as power increases, so they only way to afford something is to be far enough along in the game to have those kind of resources.
The side effect is that, as you note, lots of mundane things rapidly become trivial.
If it bothers you, one option is to use houserules to reduce gear dependency. Give your players level-based scaling bonuses to saves/AC/attacks/etc to replace those they're assumed to get from magic items, then just treat all other magic items as ancient relics that you might find as loot but don't have market prices and can't be bought/sold/crafted. Now wealth stays at a believable level, riches that they do earn feel like actual wealth since it's no longer just access to the next bonus they need to keep up (called the "treadmill effect"), and tracking silvers doesn't feel as meaningless.
Or you could do like me and start writing your own d20 fantasy game from the ground up and dodge the existing pitfalls fundamentally instead of patching things. But that's a lot of work. ;)
Copper and silver are for the verisimilitude of the world. Adventurers above 1st level soon have no reason to track copper or even silver pieces, but 1st level commoners deal primarily in that sort of coin.
Never mind that the price lists for mundane equipment do not really hold up that well when looked at from that point of view....
Some people just love this trivia, they would far rather collect and write down things like "slightly flawed agate carved into square worth 2gp" than "2gp".
It's harmless and they have fun.
What I do is have my PC collect little bags full of copper & silver, then drop these if pursued or for bribes or gifts or for beggars. Great RP thing.
Gotta have something to toss to beggers. 100 cp will get them lots of bread.
They're pretty much just there for equipment during character creation, yeah.
When I am not running an AP, I drop silver and copper from my games. Anything that costs less than 1 gp is rounded up to 1 gp or is sold in bulk at 1 gp, whichever makes more sense (for example, a bedroll is 1 gp and 10 fishhooks are 1 gp).
EDIT: It's also worth noting I don't use encumbrance rules, and even if I did, I wouldn't make money weigh anything. I prefer video game logic for these types of things.
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Jeven's got it right. Give the PCs some headaches figuring out how to transport all that cash around.
Side note: I vaguely remember playing in a PFS scenario (or maybe a module; it's been a while) a couple of years ago where one of the treasures was a bag of 2500 gp in a swamp, that an NPC had dropped there when he was killed or kidnapped or something. That's 50 pounds of gold, that a peasant or some such was just carrying through a swamp. Because fantasy worlds not only don't have to make sense, they're specifically prohibited from doing so.
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Jeven's got it right. Give the PCs some headaches figuring out how to transport all that cash around.
Yeah, because nothing says 'you've earned a reward' like a logistics nightmare.
Pathfinder money doesn't make a bit of sense, really. Fundamentally, there are two economies going on in a game of Pathfinder.
1. Real people money, where most things are priced in copper and silver. A gold piece is a decent pile of money (roughly speaking a day's labor, based on the Profession skill with one rank in it making you 7 gp/week), and platinum are quite rare. Beer costs a few coppers, a nice dinner a few silvers, and you make Even something like a potion of cure light wounds is very valuable, and represents several weeks worth of work, but you might need it if Pa breaks his leg or something so the family doesn't starve (otherwise you have to go beg the local adept).
2. Adventurer money, where all of that is completely irrelevant. Copper and silver coins are essentially meaningless, used only for bribing peasants. Even meager 1st level hauls will value in the dozens of gold, weeks worth of work for a common laborer. Of course, you may die bleeding in a ditch with a goblin arrow sticking out of your neck, but if you don't, you live like a king in comparison to the other guy from your village that took over his father's pig-slop business. Money is only valuable for what magic items you can buy with it, as Jiggy discussed above.
I once found a good use for cp and sp...
A character was running from a gangster that he owed money to. After expenses for tracking the character down, he owed 50,000gp. He also had a default judgment against him in court since he didn't show up, and was facing a hard-labor program which paid 5cp - 3sp a day, depending on the work performed. As the gangster said, "even if you were an elf, you wouldn't live long enough to pay this off."
So he went on a quest to retrieve a relic of evil power for the gangster to work off the debt...
Other than that, yeah, I pretty much ignore the small change.
When playing the old gold box games, I stopped picking up platinum in Secret of the Silver Blades, then gems in Pools of Darkness, since the game did track weight. I still ended up with too many jewels to carry it all.
Pathfinder money doesn't make a bit of sense, really. Fundamentally, there are two economies going on in a game of Pathfinder.
1. Real people money, where most things are priced in copper and silver. A gold piece is a decent pile of money (roughly speaking a day's labor, based on the Profession skill with one rank in it making you 7 gp/week), and platinum are quite rare. Beer costs a few coppers, a nice dinner a few silvers,...
2. Adventurer money, where all of that is completely irrelevant. Copper and silver coins are essentially meaningless, used only for bribing peasants. Even meager 1st level hauls will value in the dozens of gold, weeks worth of work for a common laborer. Of course, you may die bleeding in a ditch with a goblin arrow sticking out of your neck, but if you don't, you live like a king in comparison to the other guy from your village that took over his father's pig-slop business.
And if you look at Spain during the Conquistador period, that makes sense. The colonies and ports were swimming in gold, with triple digit inflation, etc. Same as The Yukon, etc.
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We have a similar houserule. The prices for all non-weapon mundane items remain the same, but the prices for all magic items and weapons are dropped to one tenth. Effectively, all references to "gp" become silver pieces. My players have commented on how much more believable it feels when you're not carting Fort Knox around in your backpack. 8000 gold coins should be a royal haul.
Another side of the same problem is that the "Big Six" magical items are necessary to have viable characters and are also expensive and horribly, horribly boring (this cloak makes you ever so slightly better at diving for cover, resisting mental control, and metabolizing poison. What?!). We just scrapped these items and replaced them with more frequent ability increases. It's worked pretty well.